NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has scraped away at some of the oldest rock it's examined and found the strongest signs for water it has ever discovered over its 9.5-year mission, scientists for the Mars Exploration Rover project said Friday. The...

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover got its own official Lego avatar. The Mars Science Laboratory robot was picked by thousands of fans to be designed in toy brick form, and it joins a pantheon of other Red Planet...

NASA scientists said Thursday that the agency will no longer attempt to restore full function to the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope, which has been hobbled since the spring.
A three-month effort to return the craft to working order,...

Cigarette smoking may have earned a reputation as an unhealthy, cancer-causing pastime, but water pipes seem to have largely evaded the stigma. Now, new research shows that water pipes may simply be dangerous in slightly different ways, according to a...

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NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has emerged from its "spring break" and is back to work, officials at Jet Propulsion Laboratory said this week. Up next on the agenda: Drilling the second target at Yellowknife Bay.
The Mars Science Laboratory mission made big news shortly before its break, turning up key evidence of life-friendly environments in its first drill sample, said mission deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada.
The revelation came just in time. Mars slipped behind the sun during the month of...

Planet-hunting scientists were dealt a major blow Wednesday when NASA officials announced that a crucial wheel on the Kepler space telescope had ceased to function and that the craft had been placed in safe mode.
Even as NASA officials raised the possibility that they could get the telescope back up and running, scientists began mourning the potential loss of a spacecraft that they said had fundamentally altered our understanding of alien planets in the Milky Way — and Earth's place in an...

UFO watchers' eyes were set ablaze recently by reports of what looked like a stony rodent lurking among the rocks on Mars. The so-called Mars rat, spotted in an image taken last year by the NASA rover Curiosity’s Mast Camera, captured imaginations even as it inspired several new parody Twitter accounts.
But, just so it's clear, this Red Planet rodent – which looks rather more like a guinea pig to this reporter’s eye – is no more real than the Man in the Moon. In fact, the rat...

NASA’s Curiosity rover has breathed in Martian air and sniffed out good news and bad news for alien life: The Red Planet’s atmosphere was likely several times thicker early in its history – but it’s probably been thin for billions of years, according to scientists on the Mars Science Laboratory mission.
Given Mars' current lack of hospitality, two papers published in the journal Science hint that the hunt for critters on Mars would have a better chance by looking for truly...

NASA engineers have built a device that uses radar to detect heartbeats in the rubble of collapsed buildings, with technology typically used to explore other planets. The FINDER device, developed with the Department of Homeland Security, could help search-and-rescue teams find survivors trapped underneath the wreckage – even when those victims can’t call for help.
Identifying people who are still alive in a collapsed building is a major challenge for urban rescue missions, said Jim Lux,...

After dancing around the moon for months, the twin satellites nicknamed Ebb and Flow performed their final number, crashing into the same peak near the lunar north pole and bringing the GRAIL mission to a close.
A cheer went up in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge as Ebb slammed into the mountain about 2:28 p.m. Monday, followed about half a minute later by Flow. The probes were traveling at nearly 3,800 mph and landed an estimated 25 miles apart.
Even as the...